Formalising credit markets? The entrance of English joint-stock banks

Barnes and Newton explore the activity of English joint-stock banks, as a precursor to the modern corporation, in the provision of credit in the first half of the nineteenth century. They employ new archival data from bank archives to show that while these firms did not have full corporate attributes, they exhibited new governance and managerial structures. The authors find that the changes in organisational form did not result in a new revolutionary way to assess loan applicants. The decision to lend remained based upon informal information gathering through commercial networks as well as upon subjective measures, such as the personality or character of the applicant.